Thursday, October 28, 2004

I've been interested in The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words for quite a while now. This is the title of an essay by Sigmund Freud and also a concept to which Christopher Ricks has been drawn more than a couple of times. Since it's also somewhat obscure, I've been using it as a way of comparing web search engines. It's interesting to see what comes up when you search the phrase in Google, Yahoo, A9, or whatever (try it, if you like). Recently I was pointed to a new search engine called Muse (it's still in development and is being marketed to the likes of the Library of Congress as a "federated search" tool -- a piece of software to search across a huge, complex site like LC's and make sense of the results. Of couse I tried my antithetical search in Muse and was surprised to find my post on Derrida ("Derrida Dead") as one of the first hits. Amazing. The Muse search is derived from Google, but you won't notice my post in the Google results because it's not in the top group. The relevancy ranking algorythm that Muse uses put me up top.

The concept is a meaty one, but Freud didn't make much of it and neither have his successors.

An online version of the essayhttp://www.poetics.yorku.ca/article.php?sid=68 The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words
Posted on Thursday 17 October @ 00:51:35
Ethnopoetics An article by Sigmund Freud explaining intriguing findings from his own analytical work.